Dodger Baseball and Me

On the eve of the World Series I am reminded of what the big games and baseball and the Dodgers mean to me.  As a kid living in the shadow of Dodger Stadium I played one year of Little League, (I was on the Giants, sadly,) outside the Elysian Park entrance to Dodger Stadium at the fields across from the Police Academy.  I don’t think I was very good at the game.  It was my baptism really, into sports in general. 

I had a tumultuous childhood.  From birth until I was 12 I experienced moments of stability but where I lived and who I lived with was often in flux.  Melham Avenue in La Puente, Greycliff Avenue in La Puente, Ranlett Avenue in La Puente, Prichard Street in La Puente, N Taylor Avenue in Montebello, Sandia Avenue in West Covina, Melrose and Western in Hollywood, Eckerman Avenue in West Covina, Sunset Boulevard in downtown LA, Quinn Street in Bell Gardens, Santa Maria, Nipomo, Sandalwood in Nipomo, and a few others I have lost track of all gave way to teenage years spent on Calvados Avenue in Covina, California. 

I was staying with my Aunt and Uncle as I had at times before, in the Spring of 1975.  On Monday, April 14^th, I went with my Uncle to the Dodger’s home opener and sat high up in the reserved section on the 3^rd base line.  It was an electric night.  The Dodgers had lost the World Series the year before to a star-packed Oakland A’s team that included Reggie Jackson, Sal Bando, Gene Tenace, Joe Rudi, Bert Campaneris, Vida Blue, Catfish Hunter, Bill North, Ray Fosse and Rollie Fingers.  (A more colorful team is yet to be seen.)  The giveaway for the night was a National League Champions pennant and when Ron Cey hit a solo shot off of Jack Billingham the crowd pulsed with excitement.  In the 6^th inning however, with the outcome still very much in question, the Toy Cannon, Jimmy Wynn, came up and blasted one into the left field pavilion and the ravine erupted. 

Studies have been done on the excitement and mentality of crowds.  For me, not yet 10-years-old, I remember a certain ecstasy that had been otherwise foreign to me.  I remember the sound and the fury, the elation and the energy, as if it woke me from a somnambulant state life had been training me in.  It was magical and that Jimmy Wynn homerun stuck with me and carried me really for years.  It was of my happiest moments.  The positivity of life became real to me in the company of Dodger fans.

A few years later when my Aunt and Uncle had taken me in even though I was a Ward of the Court, (or a child of Los Angeles County,) my Uncle had connections to baseball.  First, his company had 8 of the best seats in the house at the Big A and so I got to go to quite a few games and sat in the front row, right behind the on deck circle for the visiting team.  My Uncle also had a coworker who was a scout for the Dodgers and so when the Dodgers returned to the World Series in 1977 and 1978 and 1981, I got to go to some of the games. 

Happy (Burt) Hooton was my favorite Dodger pitcher and he had pitched in many of the three World Series in five years between the Yankees and Dodgers.  For me the Dodger-Yankee World Series was expected and Burt Hooton’s knuckle-curve was virtually un-hittable.  The night of Game 6, I had left my seat in the left field pavilion to go to the restroom but then of course, I ended up at the back of the Dodgers bullpen trying to get Hooton’s attention.  I thought maybe I could get him to give me a ball.  I was 12.  Instead I remember a groan coming from the crowd as I strained to see, through the slight crack where the gate swung, what was happening on the field.  I could not see the players on the field but I did see a fly ball high in the night air and I had a sick feeling in my stomach.  I raced back to my seat to discover the dastardly Reggie Jackson had done it again, another homerun this time off Bob Welch. 

The Dodgers lost the World Series that night and my disappointment was profound.  I remember the drive home, feeling so crestfallen I did not know what I would do with myself.  That my Uncle who would become my Dad got Reggie Smith’s bat for me from his coworker took the edge off in subsequent days.  It went into the family trophy case where I admired it often.

I stayed a baseball fan.  I am a true blue Dodger fan and an Angels fan.  The Angel’s 2002 World Series championship is one of my favorite victories by any of my teams.  I stayed a fan of baseball even through the period of rampant cheating, (guys using PEDs to gain an unfair advantage over those who did not use illegal drugs, or worse, artificially keeping players from even making the big leagues and realizing that big pay day.)  I am well versed on the history of the game.  I think Sandy Koufax is likely the most dominant pitcher ever, though I have only seen old film of him. 

I collected cards too, when I was a teenager.  In the end I sold them to fuel my severe Asteroids habit but I had some great cards.  I remember Topps informing me on the greats of the game, from Pie Traynor to Christy Mathewson to Rogers Hornsby, and the great Cy Young himself.  I remember a Brewer named Kurt Bevacqua had won a bubble gum biggest bubble contest and had the human head sized bubble immortalized on card stock.  I had outsized cards I got at Dodger Stadium of Frank Howard and Ken Boyer.  I loved the nicknames.  Mick the Quick.  The Penguin, (Ron Cey who I just met a couple of weeks ago.  I stood in line with all the autograph seekers then told him when I got to him I just wanted to shake his hand and that when I was a kid he was The Man.  And he was…)  Mr. Clean.  The Express.  Mr. October.  (I embraced him as an Angel.)  Disco Dan.  Game Over.  And of course, Happy, a name given Burt Hooton because of his implacable lack of facial expressions.  Baseball irony. 

Those World Series games along with a couple of unforgettable playoff games, (seeing a ball go under Garry Maddox’s glove in the bottom of the 9^th to win a 5-game series against the Phillies from almost directly behind him in the left field pavilion,) was absolutely amazeballs.  Watching the game from way up in the left field reserve section of Dodger Stadium, nearly at the top, to see Jerry Reuss beat the Astros in a 1-game playoff was similarly charged.

I came to love the nuance of the game.  The evolution brought about by advanced metrics puts all that nuance on center stage.  How will Kershaw pitch to JD Martinez?  Same as ever?  How will all these lefties fare: Sale, Price, Kershaw and Ryu, in the first two games?  Will Matt Kemp come up big?  Will the Dodgers get to the Boston bullpen?  Who will the designated hitter benefit the most?  Which team’s pitchers can the other team steal on?  Will the New England fans cheer Dave Roberts?  Will Dodger fans remember Alex Cora?  

I do.  In the late ‘90s and early '00s my company had four season seats 19 rows behind the visiting dugout.  For a couple of years I was lucky enough to receive those tickets about 10 times each year.  (How I still love my bosses all those years ago at Sparkletts Water.)  Welcome to the Jungle, indeed.  As disappointing as those Piazza and Karros years were and as shameful it was to have been linked to steroids, when Eric Gagne came into the game I would always watch the top of the visiting dugout.  Without fail every player would come to the front edge to stand and watch this guy throw 99 mph with a downward screw on the ball that was practically unhittable.  It was exciting.  One mid-season night, Sparkletts Water night in fact, guess who got to throw out the first pitch in a mid-season game against the Astros.  That’s right, the kid who became the old man who can still imitate the batting stances of all the starters from those 1978, 1979 and 1981 teams, to say nothing of the pitching motion of one Burt Carlton Hooton.  

I don’t know if baseball would have caught fire with me had I not attended those big games when I was a youngster.  I am not sure I would have played through high school and beyond including some high level fast and slow pitch softball right through my 20s and 30s.  It would not have been the end of the world either if I did not become a fan of America’s pastime.  However, it has been exceedingly positive for me.  I’m so, so thankful.

And here we are again.  The Dodgers are in the World Series and now I am a father and my children are 14 and 11.  We were at a Dodger-Angel game earlier this season, (interleague play,) and the kids were given free Mike Trout jerseys and my daughter, who is the sportier of the two, really embraced the Angels and Trout throughout the game.  She liked Ohtani’s deep homerun to center field and relished being the contrarian in the group as the rest of us seemed to represent the Dodgers.  Just a few weeks prior to that we were at a Los Angeles Galaxy game and I saw her adopt the ardor of her friends for the Galaxy and specifically for Zlatan Ibrahimovic.  She asked me if she could go ask Zlatan to autograph her shoes post game.  These are examples of her first real interest.  As if in concert her own soccer game has taken off of late.  In my humble opinion she may have become the best player on her team in the course of the current season, when at the outset maybe she was 4^th or 5^th.  As for my son we will see.  So far he remains more interested in the concessions and souvenirs.  

I may be calling radio stations this week.  The lowest cost for tickets I have seen is $700 per.  I can’t afford to take my kids at that price and that’s okay.  If nothing else we’ll go to the Boat in San Gabriel so we can be around Dodger fans and hear some yelling and cheering as we watch the game.  The other night we watched game 7 at Shakey’s and every time the Dodgers scored a run I gave Mark the green light to do a loud impersonation of Nelson from the Simpsons.  His impression is spot on and hilarious and so, when he did it out loud at the pizza joint, it seemed my friend David and I cracked up but so did some others from around us, which pleased Mark and got him more into the game. 

I’d love them to have an experience similar to my own.  I’d love to find a way to take them to the World Series.  In lieu of such an outcome we are going to enjoy these baseball games like nobody’s business.  In the end I hope the Dodgers prevail.  I want that because I love the Dodgers and it has been too long. The Dodgers have the best and most loyal fan base in sports.  More, they deserve a big win after having endured the bad ownership groups that were Fox and the Mc Courts.  Also, Boston.  Frank Mc Court is from there and Red Sox fans largely suck.  

Most of all I want the Dodgers to win for Clayton Kershaw.  He has surpassed Nolan Ryan and Frank Tanana and Fernando Valenzuela and yes, Happy, as the best pitcher I have seen in my lifetime and I want the Dodgers to win one with him and for him and I want him to be relevant when that happens, which is now. 

Let’s Go, Dodgers!

Tender Age Shelter

I lived 10 days in a tender age shelter and the trauma remains.  I was 11-years-old.  I had not committed a crime.  I was taken from the home of an Aunt and Uncle and incarcerated at McLaren Hall in El Monte, California.  I survived but I was changed.

MacLaren Hall was a notorious and violent institution.  You can google and read about the Lost Children of MacLaren Hall on many websites.  My mother was a criminal and a heroin addict.  She brought me into contact with a brutal, violent man and my brief stay at MacLaren Hall marked the end of the few turbulent years of my life I spent living with my mother.  The County of Los Angeles had to decide on whom would be my legal guardian.

My youngest years were spent with my grandfather.  He made me live by the law of his belt and I adapted and thrived.  I remember a teacher I had in the 2^nd grade, Miss Moss, telling my grandpa I needed to be in what they called a mentally gifted minors program and that I could do anything with my life.  2^nd grade is early to make such determinations. 

At around 8 years of age my mom got out of prison and persuaded the court to give her custody of me.  It was great.  Her pure love and adoration nurtured a sense of self in me I had not known.  It was also horrible.  I spent mornings hanging around the methadone center and nights avoiding the violence of her husband.  In between I navigated the streets of downtown Los Angeles, Bell Gardens or Hollywood, more or less aimlessly.  I was only with her for a couple of years or so but we moved a lot. 

When I think back to those times I sense in those early years I really could have become anything.  I could have been a scholar.  I might have become a professional.  The tumultuous years with my mother were a blessing and a curse in ways.  They marked me and changed me.  I developed a sense of a bully that is as strong today as it was in my 9-year-old mind when I plotted what I would do to the bully in my life when I reached a certain age. 

At 11 when  I entered my tender age shelter I was in shock.  I was living in  Hollywood on Western just off of Melrose, down the street from KHJ radio.  I had adapted to a lifestyle of sorts.  I stayed out of the apartment as much as possible.  My best friend was an African-American man who had an apartment nearby.  I had a bicycle and I rode it everywhere.   My bully would lose his shit one night and fire a gun at my mom and she would hock her wedding ring the next morning to get him out of jail.  Then one day something happened and my mom knew she was in trouble.  I was out riding my bike and when I returned around sunset there were police all over the apartment complex and two of my uncles were out front.  They said they did not know why the cops were there but that my mom had asked them to come pick me up because she had to go away for a little while.  She was on the run.

I shuffled between the homes of a couple of uncles until that day my social worker came to get me.  I sobbed as I left La Puente for the tender age shelter that was MacLaren Hall.

My arrival was a scene I will never forget.  I was told to walk across a playground and go to a building that would be my dormitory.  When I opened the door to that room cacophonous sounds shocked my ears.  At just that moment a kid who looked 14 or 15 escaped the clutches of one of the counselors and dove under a bed.  The counselor grabbed the single bed and slid it away exposing the boy who scrambled to the next bed.  All the while the Counselor was screaming expletives at the top of his lungs until at the end of the line where there were no more beds, only a wall, he got his hands on the kid.  He pulled him up into the air like a rag doll and through him a few feet in the air at the wall.  I remember the kid bouncing a little off the wall.  The counselor grabbed him again and pulled up off the ground and slammed him two or three more times into the wall this time without letting go of him.  The kid was crying and growling and dazed. 

Me?  I stood there and sobbed.  I have never been as scared as that moment.  I had no control over my life.  A system was telling me what to do.  In this world I had arrived in “Counselors,” could beat children.  I looked outside at the grounds and saw a large concrete wall and yes, it had barbed wire at the top.  I told myself I would find a way over that wall.  That was a pervasive thought for me all the days I spent at MacLaren Hall. 

I saw violence daily at MacLaren Hall.  I cried on a few occasions, which is not an ideal thing to do in a place with a hierarchy of violence.  The Counselors were lethal and the older kids were dangerous.  The older kids were utterly different from me in that they were already hardened.  Their anger was palpable.  I remember vividly how I viewed them and knowing the most important thing I could do would be to guard my sense of innocence.  I grew a hard outer shell from the knowledge of this place.  I did not get beaten.  One night I failed to obey quite right and a Counselor gave me a good shove as he yelled at me to pick up the mess and get in the bed. (or something like that,) and I moved from the push but quickly recovered and survived.  My modus operandi in that place was to make myself invisible.  I laid low.  I hid from  view behind others.  I looked down always.  The hard shell I put on softened the darkness that invaded my being and my innocence and youth and trust in humankind concentrated itself at my core and remained as perfect and golden as ever, if smaller. This is how I remember it.  I was protecting something.  When they asked who was Catholic and wanted to go to an Ash Wednesday service I raised my hand in spite of the fact I had little church background.  There were only three of us but the chance to go the little chapel was time away from the violence.  

I remember walking by a scene one day on the playground when a kid who was certainly no threat to anyone, who walked around most days sobbing and who could not talk back to me the time I tried to talk to him, was on the ground with three bigger kids around him kicking him.  I had somewhere to go and I barely allowed myself to look.  When I looked around for authority figures I saw one watching from a distance and slowly starting towards the malice underway.  So I protected what was inside me with all I had.  And my day in court arrived and I spent several hours focused on my hope that I not have to return to that place. 

My Aunt and Uncle agreed to become my legal guardians while I remained a ward of the court, one of Los Angeles County’s sons.  I was changed after my time in a tender age shelter.  Within a couple of weeks of living with my new family I got up one Sunday night during church and walked to the front as Just As I am was being sung by the congregation to accept the religion of my family and become born again.  Being born again became the driving force of the rest of my childhood.  

I lost so much of my self.  I lived with a fear of ever being in a place like MacLaren Hall again.  I was an agreeable kid, with everyone, at all times.  My Uncle often said I was a good kid.  I was a good kid, because I could not, would not go back to that tender age shelter or anywhere like it.  I was scarred and I was scared by my tender age shelter.  It is likely I have been significantly inhibited in life by my time there.  This is not an excuse.  This is merely a conclusion I draw from my personal experience. 

Tender age shelters, violent or otherwise, are not places kids go to end up stable, law abiding citizens.  Being taken away from your family, from those you love and who love you, is traumatic for children.  It twists and affects us.  We become angry and afraid in circumstances such as these.  I know this personally. 

Artists Against Bullies

Have you seen this?

Or this?

This?

What about this?

I'm thinking about the protest music of this generation.  I'm thinking about how strong these messages are, how smart and polished they are.  I'm thinking about white rappers and black rappers and old Irishmen and all the rest.

This President has inspired an epic resistance.  The last Republican President took us into a war that killed 100,000 people in and from a distant land, on false pretense no less.  Americans cared more about the 5,000 dead Americans, (even though they returned in boxes under press blackout.)  He did not even account for the trillions of dollars spent making war in the national budget.  George W Bush is in fact a war criminal.

However, Donald Trump's Presidency inspires a much deeper sense of dissatisfaction and disgust.  By comparison his actions thus far in terms of Presidential actions, the business of being President, have not been resulted in so much death or destroyed our economy.  Yes, he has set a path to destroy the cabinet departments from within and in that regard he is a Republican dream come true.  Yes, he gave large tax breaks to corporations who in turn showered the money on their CEO's and shareholders while giving a pittance to the stakeholders knowing and trusting they would interpret the largess as a sure sign this is the best of all possible worlds. Yes, the economy appears to be healthy.

Obama bit the bullet and accounted for the previous administrations war while also bailing out Wall Street, which had essentially lied and gambled the world economies into unprecedented peril, to the tune of $700 billion.  The entire eight years of Obama's Presidency Republicans castigated him as if he caused the mess when in fact he was the adult coming in after the fact and making the hard choices to restore order.

After eight years of Obama acting responsibly, what do we get?  Donald Trump.  More military spending and a wall.  Cabinet heads hell bent on destroying their own departments.  An FCC Chairman who is opposed to net neutrality.  A Department of Education Secretary who would prefer to hand her budget over to religious schools and all other manner of magnet head start charlatans and snake oil salesman while destroying the notion of public education.  The Head of the EPA is positively opposed to the environment and in favor of big business. Mentioning these three of course is shooting fish in a barrel.  the sum total of Donald Trump's appointments is equally destructive.  Still, it is not 105,000 dead human beings in  Iraq.  It is not the world economy on the brink of collapse.

At my ripe old age these actions look like a cycle to me.  We will have Democrats in office soon and they will responsibly go about fixing this mess we have brought on ourselves by making hard choices to fund the commons and so on.  The Republicans in turn will blame the Democrats who will then be in office as the corporations cut off bonuses and wages stagnate, (meanwhile shareholders and CEOs continue to prosper-they're immune to virtually any turns in the economy.)  Dumb Americans will lap it up and vote Republican at some point thereafter and the cycle continues.

Donald Trump is reviled and not just by Eminem.  The ire he draws is certainly related to the policies of destruction he is beholden to.  It is more though.  Even Americans who are not attuned to the harsh realities of this Presidency are disgusted by Trump's personal nature.  He is a bad criminal.  He has succeeded in the most temporary manner there is, sucking dollars from fame like a dog at a garden spigot.

Yes, a lot of people like Donald Trump.  Bis businessmen and Christians and mean people mostly, but maybe a quarter of Americans actually like him in spite of any sense of decency or decorum.  Of course there were those who were opposed to freeing the slaves, those who believed in earnest the women of Salem were witches, those who did not want women to vote and so on.

And yes, the economy is basically good right now.  The tax cuts however mean less social safety net, less services, less of the commons.  Americans ultimately like those things.  We don't like opioid addiction.  We don't like rampant homelessness.  We don't like people living in their cars and in their RVs.  My little town in northeastern Los Angeles county has seen a large increase in homelessness recently.  This in part due to the arrival of mass transit, (the gold line made it to Monrovia.) Equally startling and tragic is the number of people I see living in their cars or RV's. 

What we don't seem to get as a people, or society, is that in choosing capitalism we choose a competition. Competitions have winners and losers.  This means both upward and downward mobility exists.  What happens to the losers in our societal competition?  Mostly they end up in prisons, or mental health institutions or homeless.  The homeless are those who could not compete successfully. 

Our society is not completely capitalist however, nor has it ever been.  We have always had a blend of socialism mixed in; the commons if you will.  Government, prisons, cops, firefighters, national parks, the military, highways, these are just a few of our common endeavors our taxes are used for.  As Americans we do not like to see people suffer the indignities of poverty. And so it is when the Republicans get their way and services and commons are cut so that those who would can capitalize, until children are again in the workforce or wages are just so low the masses will no longer tolerate it, when the separation of the classes begins to look like an apartment renter class and an apartment  homeowner class, when the homeless themselves rise up, we will vote again for the policies of those services. The travesty of this cycle is that it is often the impoverished who are the true believers in upward mobility.  They often believe the empathy of society manifested in the form of social services and such is the cause of their bad fortune, (never even considering the military budget, which if they did consider it they would credit for protecting them from other bogeymen who would stifle their imminent success.)  So it is as Trump carries out the plans of the right, of the Koch Brothers and Sheldon Adelson, (men who spend billions of dollars to influence public policy so they can wield ever more power,) As the President who is accomplishing this sinister plan at present he is certainly heroic.  Even if they mock Trump for all of his foibles in private they also  praise their good fortune he was elected, even if the only wealth he cares about is his own.

And so it is in spite of the overtly destructive nature of George W Bush's presidency and the relative prosperity of Americans at present Trump's presidency is in fact far more destructive and vile.  His presidency is meant to seal the fate of the lower classes.  If Trump is to be impeached or prosecuted it simply cannot happen soon enough.  The voice of the artists is the voice of the people and it will only get  louder and increasingly pervasive.